I’m a trusted seller but have never been a premium member, so it’s not that.
After only two or three sales I got the status, it’s supposedly a combination of items sold complying with description in every respect, responsiveness to comments and offers, shipping sold items quickly and carefully. Maybe I got luckier because I got asked a lot of questions by buyers and responded to all of them and I just chalked up a few more Brownie points quickly by virtue of the number of replies as well. I believe they take the status away if you stop doing these things, but I can’t remember where I think I know that from. And ... maybe it takes more sales to get trusted status now than it did back then? There is a new CEO and huge changes, maybe it is all being tightened up.
I don’t think it’s anything to do with value as my first items weren’t worth very much. Probably also includes things like providing clear and helpful photos and giving useful information in the description like measurements (it always surprises me that people expect to sell an item without giving measurements!).
Presumably there’s an algorithm that produces the result and it’s a little more complex than a particular level of any one thing? I think they are making a lot of changes at the moment to polish it all up and I think it’s quite likely we will start finding customer service people are better informed. I think I’ve noticed a quicker response and more switched on approach?
That could be quite useful, couldn’t it, though I always worry about slandering someone based on one bad experience that wasn’t necessarily their fault. It’s tricky sometimes, isn’t it? I definitely agree that sharing good experiences as well as bad would be good if we could. Only problem there is that some posters then go and accuse others of being fakes who are there to promote their own seller profiles rather than sharing good experiences. Or of course some people might actually self-promote, secretly, and this is not and should not be a selling platform. So that’s tricky too. How do they manage this in other threads, say for EBay, do you know? Or for other platforms? Thinking about it, I reckon it’s quite a difficult thing to do here without courting accusations of slander or covert self-promotion. Another stumbling block in the resale world! I’m sure these issues have been worked out by people far wiser and with more experience than me.
Going back to Vestiaire, looking at how many items someone has sold in the context of whether they have trusted status is useful. It’s a lovely great big red flag if they’ve sold 10 or 20 or 50 things but don’t have trusted status! I’ve ordered from non-trusted people only a couple of times, as far as I remember; one cancelled the order, the other left it sitting there for 4 weeks until it lapsed and I got my automatic refund, didn’t communicate with me at all once she’d made the sale, though she had been charm itself till that point. I imagine she spent the four weeks seeing if she could get a higher price somewhere else and would have let me have my item if it was still unsold elsewhere, and she probably repeatedly conducted sales like that - hence no trusted seller status despite a high number of sales. I could have approached VC or PayPal to cancel sooner as she was unresponsive, but I held on just in case as I really wanted that rare item.
I’ve never had a problem ordering from a trusted seller. But that is only my experience, of course.
If you click on the little gold flag next to a seller’s profile picture you can see what percentage of their items have passed QC (you probably know that but it’s one of those things you stumble across by accident as Vestiaire has not historically great at explaining itself, though I personally am hoping for better communication now). My rate is 100% (and I’ve sold getting on for 150 things - wow, I buy too much, this is just from trying to reclaim space in my own wardrobe!!!), but I wouldn’t necessarily reject a seller with a 90% rate, because QC sometimes picks up on the tiniest insignificant things. (I don’t know how far the rate has to drop before you lose trusted status. I don’t think I’ve ever noticed any below 90%, but I may just not have seen others). I bought a high end bag and they offered me the chance to back out when it came without an original receipt. The buyer hadn’t specified that a receipt was available and I hadn’t asked for one, so she had completely complied with the description (and the bag was great), but she would have received a reduction on her compliance rate if I’d taken the opportunity to back out that Vestiaire gave me, which would have been a bit unfair to her. So 90%, maybe even lower, I consider probably fair enough. Or if they’ve sold 5 items and have an 80% rate, that could easily mean Vestiaire found a pretty much non-existent flaw with one item, and if everything else looks good it’s probably reasonably safe.
It’s easier with the professional sellers, since you can return for refund for any reason within two weeks anyway, so I feel it’s more of an issue with the individual sellers.
ETA: Oops, looooong post ....
